Landing The First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring

Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries - called outsourcing agencies - have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers are high quality. Workers affiliated with an agency have substantially higher job-finding probabilities and wages at the beginning of their careers compared to similar workers without an agency affiliation. This advantage declines after high-quality non-affiliated workers receive good public feedback scores. The results indicate that intermediaries have arisen endogenously to permit a more efficient allocation of workers to jobs.

Keywords: Labor market intermediation; Offshoring; Incomplete information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 F16 J30 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1316.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Landing the First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring (2016)
Working Paper: Landing the first job: the value of intermediaries in online hiring (2016)
Working Paper: Landing the first job: the value of intermediaries in online hiring (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1316

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